(no subject)

 Haven't posted in a while.  So... some random.

Went to see Sweeney Todd tonight.  There was a point early on (up to and during The Worst Pies in London, mostly) where I thought it was going to fall totally flat for me, but things improved drastically.  I think Sondheim's style of really weaving of the songs through scenes worked *really* well in movie format... at least as Tim Burton did it.  There comes a point where you stop noticing the line between spoken dialogue and song and the whole thing has this beautiful flow to it.  *happy sigh*  On the gore front, at least the throat slitting was pretty obvious about what was coming so I had a chance to squinch my eyes a bit instead of actually watching.  I *really* could have done without the way we also got a shot of each and every corpse dropping head-first down Sweeney's chute to splat in the basement.  Ugh.  But again, easy enough to look away for.  Overall, I left the theater with my "just saw a live show" natural high, so excellent movie! :)

THIS is the best practical joke ever.  :)  Not sure it's worth $400 (and counting?) though.

Had my first ever snafu with ordering-by-mail for Christmas gifts, and I'm stewing a bit over it.  Ordered a couple small trick-boxes from Bits and Pieces last weekend that were going to be used as gift-card-delivery mechanisms.  I hate giving gift cards, so always try to have some little token to go along with the cards.  I get notified at 5:45 PM on Friday that they haven't even *shipped* the items yet and there's no way to get them to me by Christmas.  My focus has turned to making sure that they *don't* ship it now, as the shipping to me and back is going to be practically as much as the gift itself, and it's got me in a tiff to have to pay that for a package that I know in advance is not going to be useful to me.  Been trying to get through to Customer Service all morning, and it keeps hanging up on me after five minutes on hold.  *sigh*

On the music front, I've very much been enjoying Savvy_Elf's Christmas music meme and Pandora internet radio.  I know there are other sites like Pandora (let you put in "seed" songs that you like, and it plays music that fits your tastes).  Pandora works the best for me of any of the stations like it that I've tried.  I love that you can click "Why are you playing this?" and get something like:  "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features mellow rock instrumentation, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, acoustic sonority, and extensive vamping."   It's fun to see my music tastes broken down into their component elements like that. :)